1Documentation for /proc/sys/ kernel version 2.2.10
2 (c) 1998, 1999, Rik van Riel <riel@nl.linux.org>
3 4'Why', I hear you ask, 'would anyone even _want_ documentation
5for them sysctl files? If anybody really needs it, it's all in
6the source...'
7 8Well, this documentation is written because some people either
9don't know they need to tweak something, or because they don't
10have the time or knowledge to read the source code.
11 12Furthermore, the programmers who built sysctl have built it to
13be actually used, not just for the fun of programming it :-)
14 15==============================================================
16 17Legal blurb:
18 19As usual, there are two main things to consider:
201. you get what you pay for
212. it's free
22 23The consequences are that I won't guarantee the correctness of
24this document, and if you come to me complaining about how you
25screwed up your system because of wrong documentation, I won't
26feel sorry for you. I might even laugh at you...
27 28But of course, if you _do_ manage to screw up your system using
29only the sysctl options used in this file, I'd like to hear of
30it. Not only to have a great laugh, but also to make sure that
31you're the last RTFMing person to screw up.
32 33In short, e-mail your suggestions, corrections and / or horror
34stories to: <riel@nl.linux.org>
35 36Rik van Riel.
37 38==============================================================
39 40Introduction:
41 42Sysctl is a means of configuring certain aspects of the kernel
43at run-time, and the /proc/sys/ directory is there so that you
44don't even need special tools to do it!
45In fact, there are only four things needed to use these config
46facilities:
47- a running Linux system
48- root access
49- common sense (this is especially hard to come by these days)
50- knowledge of what all those values mean
51 52As a quick 'ls /proc/sys' will show, the directory consists of
53several (arch-dependent?) subdirs. Each subdir is mainly about
54one part of the kernel, so you can do configuration on a piece
55by piece basis, or just some 'thematic frobbing'.
56 57The subdirs are about:
58abi/ execution domains & personalities
59debug/ <empty>
60dev/ device specific information (eg dev/cdrom/info)
61fs/ specific filesystems
62 filehandle, inode, dentry and quota tuning
63 binfmt_misc <Documentation/binfmt_misc.txt>
64kernel/ global kernel info / tuning
65 miscellaneous stuff
66net/ networking stuff, for documentation look in:
67 <Documentation/networking/>
68proc/ <empty>
69sunrpc/ SUN Remote Procedure Call (NFS)
70vm/ memory management tuning
71 buffer and cache management
72 73These are the subdirs I have on my system. There might be more
74or other subdirs in another setup. If you see another dir, I'd
75really like to hear about it :-)
76